Irenaeus, Gauls, Keltae, Galatae, & human sacrifice

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MrMacSon
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Irenaeus, Gauls, Keltae, Galatae, & human sacrifice

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Irenaeus is "thought to have been a Greek from Polycarp's hometown of Smyrna in western Asia Minor [now İzmir, Turkey.] ... brought up in a Christian family rather than converting as an adult" and said he saw Polycarp (Adv Haers 3.3.4).

It is commonly asserted that, during the persecutions of Marcus Aurelius from 161–180 CE, Irenaeus resided in Gaul, France, in a place or region now known as Lyons. But it is hard to know why that is asserted [other than Eusebius, Historia Ecclesiastica 5.4.1].

In Adversus haereses (Against Heresies) Irenaeus alludes to coming across Gnostic writings, and holding conversations with Gnostics, and these may have taken place in Asia Minor or in Rome (Against Heresies, 1.pr.2, 4.pr.2)

In the Preface to Adv Haers. (book 1, of course) Irenaeus says

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3/ Thou wilt not expect from me, who am resident among the Keltae, and am accustomed for the most part to use a barbarous dialect, any display of rhetoric, which I have never learned, or any excellence of composition, which I have never practised,...
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Thomas Arnold in History of Rome comments -
"Much has been written upon the Kelts and their language but we seem as yet unable to connect our knowledge of the existing Keltic races with the accounts of them we have received from the writers of antiquity" [pp. 519-20]

Arnold then refers to Diodorus telling 'us' the Gauls are made up 'two great divisions of people':
  1. of the Keltic tribes from Spain, of the south and centre of Gaul, and of the north of Italy; and,
  2. the 'proper Gauls', embracing more remote tribes of Hercynian and Scythia [central & eastern Europe; including above the Black Sea].

But then, interestingly, Arnold says (pp. 520-21)

Keltae and Galatae are undoubtedly different forms of the same name; the first [ie. Keltae] was the [Latin] form with which the Greeks were earliest acquainted , at a time when their knowledge of the Kelts was confined to the tribes of Spain and Gaul. The great Gaulish migration, of the fourth century before Christ, introduced the other and more correct form "Galatae" [Galatai; Γαλάται]; yet many writers continue to use the old orthography ... with the exception of the Galatians in Asia Minor; the other Gauls, in all parts of the world, [were] generally called by the Greeks ... Keltoi; Κελτοί
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ie. the Galatians of Asia Minor - Galatai; Γαλάται - are derived from the Keltae, or were previously or also known as Keltoi [Κελτοί] (or both)


Galatia was named for the immigrant Gauls from Thrace, who settled here and became its ruling caste in the 3rd century BC, following the Gallic invasion of the Balkans in 279 BC ...


The invaders came at the invitation of Nicomedes I of Bithynia, who wanted their help in a dynastic struggle against his brother. Three tribes crossed over from Thrace to Asia Minor. They numbered about 10,000 fighting men and about the same number of women and children, divided into three tribes, Trocmi, Tolistobogii and Tectosages ...

.. the migration led to the establishment of a long-lived 'Galataean' territory in central Anatolia (which included the eastern part of ancient Phrygia) ... There they ultimately settled and, strengthened by fresh accessions of the same clan from Europe, they overran Bithynia and supported themselves by plundering neighbouring countries. The Gauls invaded eastern Phrygia on at least one occasion.[3]

Strabo describes the constitution of the Galatian state: by custom, each tribe was divided into cantons, each governed by a chief ("tetrarch") followed by a judge, whose powers were unlimited except in cases of murder, which were tried before a council of 300 drawn from the 12 cantons and meeting at a holy place, 20 miles southwest of Ancyra, written in Greek as Δρυνεμετον (Drunemeton or Drynemeton; Gaulish dru-nemeton "holy place of oak"). It is likely it was a sacred oak grove, since the name means "sanctuary of the oaks" (from drus, meaning "oak" and nemeton, meaning "sacred ground").

The Galatian arrivals left the local population of Cappadocians in control of the towns and most of the land, paying tithes to their new overlords, who formed a military aristocracy and kept aloof in fortified farmsteads, surrounded by their bands ...


Roman Galatia

After [the death of Deiotarus, a tetrach who had become 'king' of Galatia] in 25 BC, Galatia was incorporated by Augustus into the Roman Empire, becoming a Roman province. Near his capital Ancyra (modern Ankara), Pylamenes, the king's heir, rebuilt a temple of the Phrygian god Men to venerate Augustus (the Monumentum Ancyranum), as a sign of fidelity. It was on the walls of this temple in Galatia that the major source for the Res Gestae Divi Augusti were preserved for modernity. Few of the provinces proved more enthusiastically loyal to Rome.

Josephus related the Biblical figure Gomer* to Galatia (or perhaps to Gaul in general): "For Gomer founded those whom the Greeks now call Galatians, [Galls], but were then called Gomerites".[5] Others have related Gomer to Cimmerians ...
  • Ezekiel 38:6 - the ally of Gog, the chief of the land of Magog.

    The later Christian writer Hippolytus of Rome in c. 234 assigned Gomer as the ancestor of the Cappadocians, neighbours of the Galatians.

    But, Jerome (c. 390) and Isidore of Seville (c. 600) followed Josephus' identification of Gomer with the Galatians, Gauls and Celts.
Although originally possessing a strong cultural identity, by the 2nd century AD, the Galatians had become assimilated (Hellenization) into the Hellenistic civilization of Anatolia.[7] The Galatians were still speaking the Galatian language in the time of St. Jeromea (347–420 AD), who wrote that the Galatians of Ancyra and the Treveri of Trier (in what is now the Rhineland) spoke the same language (Comentarii in Epistolam ad Galatos, 2.3, composed c. 387).

The 3rd-century AD Latin historian Justin called the region "Gallo-Graecia", Epitome of Pompeius Trogus, 25.2 and 26.2
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a So, was Irenaeus referring to language still in use in a region near where he originated? or to language much further away?


Additionally, Sharon Turner in The History of the Anglo-Saxons from the Earliest Period to the Norman Conquest Volume 1 (1841) recounts that, about 280 BCE, the Kelts invaded Greece (pp. 50-1) and

"The Kelts ... serv[ed] in the armies of Ptolemy and also of Antigonus, and they had frequent battles with the Romans, but usually experienced ruinous defeats, especially with that tremendous conflict with Quintus Fabius Maximus, of which Caesar reminded Gauls of his day, when they were about to war with him, and in which Strabo states, that two hundred thousand Keltae were cut off.

"Strabo remarks of the Keltae that it was common for them to lie on the ground, that they used waxen vessels, that they were addicted to human sacrifices, from which the Romans reclaimed them .."
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